Ponderings

One of my clients has started using a automated security scanning tool to regularly crawl their Drupal site looking for vulnerabilities. In their first run of the tool, it identified only one issue: a "predictable resource location" vulnerability based on the presence of the web.config file in the Drupal docroot.

Recently at work, one of the site managers asked for a listing of which nodes on the site were using the auto-generated Pathauto paths and which were not. Should be easy, right? Just figure out where Pathauto stores whatever variable it uses to indicate if a node has the "Automatic alias" parameter set and dump the list. Turns out, actually no, it's not that simple. Pathauto doesn't store a variable.

One of the initiatives begun since I came on board at USP is to convert the team from using CVS for version control to using Git. CVS was performing adequately in most respects, but the leadership recognized that Git is the de facto industry standard these days and that, beyond the technical benefits of moving to Git, there was value in keeping up with the standards of the industry and the Drupal community. The question, then, was how to best accomplish the change.

On July 13th, I'll bid farewell to GDIT and the EOP and move on to the next step in my career. It's been an honor to work with the team there and I've learned more in the past year than I would have imagined possible, a small sampling of which are below.

Team dynamics are critical. The right combination of people in the right environment can produce some amazing outcomes and make even the most arduous environment bearable. Unfortunately, that balance is remarkably fragile. It takes very little mis-management to upset the balance and destroy morale.

Unicorns bleed rainbows.

cd -: How have I lived this long without having known about this command?

Mongo is wonderful until you need to do a simple join query, in which case you're looking at writing at least a hundred lines of application-layer code.

CDN's are insanely expensive but worth every single penny when people in Guy Fawkes masks decide to pound on your site.

Kanban is a wonderful management tool, created by 3M as a ploy to sell Post Its.*

Credit and disclaimers:

hook_career_alter() was originally developed by webchick. I'm just running a custom implementation of it.* I have no proof that 3M created Kanban...but it just makes so much sense.

The final outcome of this project came out a bit different than originally envisioned, but I'm calling this one done for now. In the end, I created a Project node type with a Taxonomy term reference for the project status and a view to display the Project nodes which have a status of either Exploration, Active, or Someday.

The openid_selector_inline submodule of OpenID Selector provides interface elements that replace the core OpenID input field with provider icons that users can click to authenticate to their identity provider. The module provides no real configuration options, though. When enabled, it automatically places its icons on the /user/login form and on the login block.